Raising the Bar: Democracy, but not as we know it

When the Berlin Wall fell, it appeared to be ‘the end of history’. Liberal democracy had won the day. Thirty years later, democracy is under pressure around the world. The forces undermining democracy – authoritarianism, corporate capture, disinformation and misinformation, political polarisation – appear to be gaining the upper hand. Is there a future for democracy in the 21st century?

This talk reveals the little-known story of how new models of citizen-led policymaking are proliferating around the world. Under our noses, democracy is being reimagined and redesigned around the edges of existing democratic institutions. Matheson will explain the big ideas driving these experiments and will sketch how these notions could be used to imagine a genuinely citizen-led system of political institutions in complex modern societies such as our own.